Redlands, California—
June 21, 2011—Esri created and released a new, comprehensive map of the world's oceans and coastal areas. The
Ocean Basemap is now available as a cached map service in ArcGIS Online. The first basemap of its kind, the Ocean Basemap is designed to support a variety of maritime GIS applications.

Esri's Ocean Basemap greatly expands the ocean content that's currently available in Esri's online basemaps. Traditional basemaps of the ocean have small scales and only include coarse-grained views of features. The Esri Ocean Basemap includes fine-grained bathymetric and altimetric data from coastal areas, where most of the human activity takes place.

Authored down to a scale of 1:1,000,000, the Ocean Basemap is built using a variety of publicly available authoritative ocean data. For scales from 1:1,000,000 down to 1:36,000, the Ocean Basemap uses the Community Maps model of seeking authoritative user content. Users can contribute data to the Ocean Basemap, just as they add data to any other basemap.

The Ocean Basemap was created with uniform cartography for consistency and a muted color palette, which makes it ideal for overlaying additional user-specific content or content from ArcGIS Online. Maritime professionals such as hydrographers, port authorities, and coastal zone planners now have a consolidated source of information to access when conducting research and creating their own maps.

Since 1969, Esri has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in geographic information system (GIS) technology, Esri software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. Esri applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world's mapping and spatial analysis. Esri is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at
esri.com/news.